Raised in Portland, Oregon, Michael Gibbons became a confirmed "plein aire" painter because of the exhilaration of responding to "the spirit of the particular moment." From May to November, he paints in Toledo, Oregon, and the rest of the year from his studio in Tubac, Arizona. He travels regularly in Europe, especially England, Ireland and France.

An Irishman, he started painting in oil in 1957, having designed accessessories for Porsches when he was in his 20s. His art talent was obvious from childhood, and by the time he was in highschool, he was an invited member of the Oregon Society of Artists. In 1968, he became a full-time painter, but he did not paint outside a studio until he moved to Toledo, Oregon.

In 1998, he completed a 62" X 42" painting, which was installed in January, 1999 in the newly renovated Oregon governor's mansion. He did the work by painting ten small paintings of the Arnold Creek Estuary on site and then enlarging each view in his studio. His studio in Toledo is in a former Methodist Church, built in 1887, and across from The Old Vicarage, an historic house, which he helped convert into the Yaquina River Museum of Art. Open by appointment and run as a charitable trust, the museum has a collection of about 125 paintings including work by Gibbons, and California painters Ken Auster and Emil Carlsen.

Of his approach to painting he says that he tries to lead the viewer into his paintings through the bottom picture plane. He uses "geometry with a golden section that's laid out in a series of ratios" that determine the central focus.


Sources include:
Information from the artist
Wolf Schneider, "My World", Southwest Art, February 2006, pp. 98-99